The Socialist Movement/Conclusion
CONCLUSION
"IF MANKIND CONTINUE TO IMPROVE"
"The form of association, however, which, if mankind continue to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief and workpeople without a voice in the management, but the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves." Thus Mill wrote in the final edition of his Political Economy. And so, in the end, Mill grew out of the principles which were as swaddling clothes to him, and ranged himself amongst those who believed that the future belonged to Socialism. His declaration of faith was in the form of a prophecy, but of a prophecy which was the ending of a life devoted in singleness of purpose to inquiry, to thought, to a pursuit of truth. And he qualified his forecast by the condition: "if mankind continue to improve."
That is the unknown factor. There are signs of degeneration all around us. We cannot draw upon the reservoirs of good physique which once were available in large village populations; we have not that mental robustness which comes from fresh air, sound and plain food, and a contact with the invigorating life of nature, of fecund seed-time and joyful harvest, of tuneful spring and solemn winter. The family unity is weakened; the motherly housewife almost belongs to the blessings that were; the head of the household is becoming a survival of words that once had a meaning but are now but a reminiscence. The masculine strength of Puritanism has gone with its repulsive austerity, and education, planted on minds of impoverished soil, is producing sickly and weedy flowers of simpleton credulity and false imagination. The comforts which the too-wealthy seek are Byzantine; the pleasures which the too-poor follow unfit them for manly effort. Humanitarianism has forbidden nature to slay the weak; a lack of scientific forethought and foresight has prevented the community from raising the mass so that the surviving weak may not lower its virility. We are in the morasses of a valley and our salvation lies on the way up to the hills. "If mankind continue to improve"! We cannot go back; we can go on, or, standing, sink down in the morass.
Progress is possible in one of two ways. We may return to the mechanical selection of nature. We may say to the heart: "Be still," and to the sympathies: "Sleep." The circumstances of life will then protect the existence of certain adaptable qualities. On the stage of nature around man, there is passing a never-ending pageantry of victim and victor. The strong trample the weak down; the hidden survive in their shadows. The late brood, insufficiently trained by the mother when she has to leave it to shift for herself in autumn, is preyed upon; the earlier brood, carefully nurtured and taught well in the school of the woodlands, survives to teach its own offspring how to preserve life. The foolish gaudy thing sparkling in the sunshine amongst the leaves is pounced upon, and nature knows it no more; the still sober thing which looks like a leaf, or a twig, or a speckled shadow eludes the eye of its hungry pursuer and lives. Forms change as nature herself changes. Cultivation drove the grey wolf and the wild ox from Great Britain, the use of firearms is exterminating the giraffe, the introduction of the pig to the Mauritius put an end to the dodo, a change in Atlantic currents nearly destroyed the tile fish of the North American coast, alterations of climate have driven whole families of animals—like the tapir—away from old haunts and homes, the development of true bird-like habits introducing the flying reptiles into new conditions doomed those which retained their jaws of teeth and failed to produce horn-cased bills and beaks, the joining of North to South America in comparatively recent times led to the wiping out of certain South American types of life like some of the armadilloes, and so on.
With man, it is different. If the climate changes, he modifies his clothes and his habitation. He finds out many inventions first of all to defy nature and then to exploit her. In common with some other animals he protects himself by forming groups, and these groups carry on the war of nature. But they nourish and nurture within themselves both individual intelligence and personal and group laws of existence, ethics, customs, justice, religion. And thus a new path of progress is discovered, the path which consists of an intelligent conception of ends and purposes and an adoption of rational means to those ends. Man supplements nature. He robs her, so to speak, of her secrets and he uses them for his own rational purposes. Nature produces everything she can and kills everything she can; man produces what he wants and kills what he does not want. Nature's selection is mechanical, man's selection is rational; nature's selection is accidental, man's selection is purposeful. The partridge is dressed in khaki because nature killed its kith and kin dressed otherwise, man dresses himself in khaki that he may not be killed at all. Human progress is not the result of the: natural law of the survival of the fittest, but of the human art of the making of the fittest. Nature surrounds her children with death, man surrounds his with life. Man, through his intelligence, co-operates with nature and with his fellows in order that he may live.
The long drawn-out tale of human progress is shadowed. by error and catastrophe, by wearisome journeys in the wilderness, by Canaans which, when yet lands beyond Jordan, were overflowing with milk and honey, but which, when conquered, were almost barren; and chapter after chapter which opens like a litany closes like a dirge. But amidst the confusion, the conflicts, the defeats, a survey of the whole pageant reveals some order, and shows the guiding purpose of an underlying idea. The realm of justice extends, the essential equality of man creates and modifies institutions, government becomes more and more a matter of consent, and the consenters become more and more active participants in it. That is what a general sweep of the pageant reveals. A closer examination also shows law and order in details. A struggle can be detected between individual freedom and social discipline, between liberty and authority, between the interests which for the time being can use social organisation for their own benefit and those victimised and exploited by such a use. This conflict is not carried on in a straight line by a steady series of advances, but rather by a rythmic pulsing, putting now one interest and now the other in the ascendancy.
The state to-day is anarchistic. We have gone well through our epoch of exploitation by individuals and classes, and the diastole and systole of history goes on. Or, to use a more familiar simile, the pendulum swings backwards—but not along the path of its forward swing. It has moved onwards. Social organisation has now to be carried to a further stage. And what has to be the subject of this organisation? It can be but one thing—economic power. The individualist epoch created that power, organised it, and broke down under its load. Like the fisherman in the Eastern tale who liberated the genii, individualism has been unable to control its own discoveries. The community, the state, the whole of the people—under whatever name it may be the pleasure of different men to designate it—must now take over this power, bridle it and harness it and make it do social work. This is the genesis of the Socialist movement: this is Socialism.
But as these changes in organisation, these fluctuations between individualism and sociality, subserve the end of human liberty and progress, so the motive force behind Socialism is not merely mechanical perfection and social economy, but life itself. Hence, around it are ranged the living impulses of religion, of ethics, of art, of literature, those creative impulses which fill man's heart from an inexhaustible store of hope and aspiration, and which make him find not only his greatest happiness but also the very reason for life itself, in pursuing the pilgrim road which, mounting up over the hills and beyond the horizon, winds towards the ideal.